One evidence of an educated heart is the realization of self-worth. I like to hear a Christian say, "I feel good about myself."
One of my friends, a catholic professor, called me one day and said, "Fred, you've known me for thirty years as a catholic drunk. Now I'm a catholic Christian." We got together for a great reunion not as friends but as brothers. During the time he said, "True dignity happens when genuine pride and genuine humility unite."
We in the Christian community think of pride and humility as being antonyms when actually they are two sides of the same coin. Don't you feel that you can be justly proud of being a child of God, a member of the family? A wealthy business friend in Boston with his wife took a girl off the street into their home for a year to help rehabilitate her. Each night after dinner he would go over the catechism he had developed for her which started out with the question, "Why does God love you?" To which she would reply, "Not because I am good but because I am precious." Then the second question was, "Why are you precious?" She would reply, "Because Christ died for me." A little 80-year-old woman in east Texas heard me tell that story, hurried to speak afterwards and with a smile said "Thank you, all my life I wanted to be precious and now I know I am."
You unite that pride with genuine humility and you have a truly educated heart. True humility is best defined as "not denying the power that you have but admitting the power comes through you and not from you." Denial is lying; attribution is truth telling. Some people develop a false humility by bad-mouthing themselves. This perpetuates a lie. We are to feel good about ourselves when we are a member of the body and we are utilizing our power, admitting that it comes through us, not from us. In this is dignity and the realization of self-worth, not image driven self-esteem, but Godly self-worth.
Another evidence of an educated heart is a homing sense— a sense for home. Just as the homing pigeon never loses that sense of home so the educated heart never loses its sense of the Father's house. Several of you, even many of you in a graduating class this large, will become lost in the trees as you chase the dollar or fame or even service. You will lose your relationship and it is then that your "homing instinct" will be activated.
I spent a day with a corporate CEO. He talked of how he graduated and went out to climb the corporate ladder and how his faith didn't seem to be applicable in his daily life. But when he began to make major decisions he found that he was making them pragmatically and that they were squaring with his "old time religious principles." He finally said it just made good sense for him to "come home" and realign himself with the church knowing that what he had learned was true. Remember as you move into bigger waters and captain larger ships that even the most powerful vessel in the fleet bows to the instructions of the lighthouse. You have set a lighthouse in your harbor to mark the way home.
